Jonah Lehrer pointed out a profile of Magnus Carlsen, the youngest chess player to achieve a number one world ranking. Lehrer delves right into deliberate practice with this thought.

One of the fascinating elements of Carlsen’s talent is that he’s learned the game by playing computer chess, matching his wits against advanced algorithms. The end result is a prodigy who’s amassed an unprecedented amount of deliberate practice at an early age, as he’s able to play multiple games on the same machine at the same time. Computers, in other words, have accelerated the pace of his chess education.

Which makes me wonder if that has any other areas where the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can be achieved or “quickened” by computers. Poker? Computer Programming?

The part that really got my attention was when Lehrer – who you should bookmark, real talk – points out the correlation between deliberate practice and intuition.

experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors – all those mistakes they made in the past – have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can’t begin to explain.

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The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.

Watching this Merlin Mann video last night, he referenced second-order ignorance (or incompetence) from Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt.

a novice at a particular skill is so unskilled that they don’t even realize how unskilled they really are. This leads beginners to greatly overestimate their own ability. In many cases, it can lead a beginner to be more confident in their own skill than an expert.

I think this happens a lot, especially to me. Merlin continues in the video talking about advanced-beginners and subtly touches on how wikipedia and the internet can make us all advanced-beginners rather quickly. It’s pretty fascinating stuff and tangentially relates to all the natural talent/deliberate practice/relaxed concentration talk.

I’ve touched on deliberate practice before, but I finally got around to reading the article that (apparently) kicked off the question of “when someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good“. In the article is a great definition of deliberate practice:

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

And, to touch on something I firmly believe in with work: you can only succeed (work-wise) if you care about what you’re working on.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

This whole concept of how people get to be great at something is really fascinating to me. There’s deliberate practice, natural talent, relaxed concentration, and now psycho-cybernetics (as I found out via this article on Allen Iverson).

Then there’s the practice thing. You might not like it, and you might not buy it. But you should at least understand Allen Iverson’s approach to the game. Larry Platt’s Only the Strong Survive, which every Denver Nugget fan should read immediately, makes clear that, petulant as it may sound, Iverson is an artist. Both in reality–he can do things with pen and paper that would amaze you–and in his approach to the game. It’s helpful to understand that. This segment deals with Dennis Kozlowski, who was both the football coach and the athletic director at Bethel High School:

Kozlowski was a staunch believer in psychocybernetics. He’d preach the value of visualization long before such mental gymnastics were in vogue. He had Allen read the book Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who maintained that, even after reconstructive nose surgery, many patients would still see their old nose when they looked in the mirror; such was the power of the brain’s imagery. Kozlowski would tell Iverson to tie his shoe while continuing to carry on a conversation with him. Iverson would be speaking to him, looking up at him, while kneeling and tying his shoe. “See that,” Kozlowski said. “See how you didn’t have to look at yourself tying your shoe? See how you didn’t even have to think about it? I want you to play like you just tied your shoelaces–automatically. The way you do that is by having an image in your mind of what you do before you do it.”

“Allen took psychocybernetics to a new level,” Kozlowski recalls. Today, Iverson doesn’t like to talk about how he does what he does on the basketball court. “I just do it,” he says. Partially, like any artist, he is wary of overanalyzing his gift. But it could also be that he’s known since high school that the real explanation defies easy answers, that the answer is, at heart, both beneath and above the level of language, and connected, on some level, to his psyche. In other words, missed in all the hand-wringing about his lackadaisical practice habits in the NBA is the possibility that so much of his work is cerebral. Unlike, say, Jordan, who was a craftsman, someone who would take hundreds of jumpshots a day, Iverson imagines the possibility and then acts it out.

Jonah Lehrer summarizes a couple links about athletes choking. Good quotes and articles to read if you’re into that sort of thing. This David Foster Wallace blurb touches on the deliberate practice versus natural talent debate.

It’s not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even – and for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially – under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

Gym Jones has more on deliberate practice versus talent debate.

Real training means committing to the process: showing up at the keyboard or behind the lens or in the ring or on the rope, and doing it religiously, even when you’re tired, even when you’ve got nothing to say, even when it’s too cold, too hot, too hard.

People wish they had talent. They see it as a practice-free ticket to crowd-stunning skill. But talent doesn’t exist. “Talent” doesn’t get results; practice and devotion do

In the past, I’ve wondered (outloud to some friends) how difficult it would be to become a professional golfer. Before I dive in, I’ll throw some assumptions (and my golf pedigree) out there.

money is available, but in limited quantities / access to a golf course and practice facility / access to exercise facility / golf equipment is current technology / weather would allow year-round golf / I’ve played golf since I was 5 / My handicap as of September 2008 is 1.4 / I played golf in high school, but not in college

Before I tick-off the professional golfers who are serving their time on the mini-tours and struggling to get by, I’m not saying I can or ever would be able to compete on the professional level. (As an aside, I know many struggling professional golfers who are great players; with the way I currently play, there is absolutely NO WAY I can compete with them, they are that much better). I’m just asking the question, how close could I come to that competition if I took a year off and completely focused on my game?

There’s been a few attempts from people to do similar things. ESPN featured Kathryn Bertine on a two-year quest to make the Olympics (spoiler: she failed).

This also brings up something I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at: deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule. While I won’t dive into what these both are right now, expect to read more about these ideas.

[Deliberate practice]  is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

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Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is simply a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of 10,000 hours.

I don’t know if this is possible, but it’s fun to think about. Like I said I know plenty of guys who are struggling on the mini-tours and can mop the floor with me on the course, so I’m highly hesitant to say it’s possible. Thoughts?